Wednesday, October 09, 2019

Indian investigators have revealed that an Air India Airbus A319 which suffered a severe hard landing at Chennai was released to continue flying and not taken out of service for five days.

The aircraft had landed on Chennai's runway 25, with a descent rate of 400ft/min, touching down initially with a 1.6g impact before bouncing.

Five seconds later it contacted the runway again, this time with a descent rate of 912ft/min, and the impact was much harder at more than 3.5g.

Airbus considers a hard landing to be above 2.6g and a severe hard landing to be above 2.86g.

The Indian DGCA says an automatic load report was not generated, and the captain instead took a manual report from the computer – which showed a 1.59g impact – and consulted with a maintenance engineer.

It points out that only a verbal exchange took place and the matter was not recorded in the technical log.

After a visual inspection, and in the absence of a formal abnormal record, the aircraft was released to service.

It then operated for a further 30 sectors over the next few days until, on 3 October, a routine flight-operations monitoring analysis picked up the unusually-high 3.5g impact recorded during the landing.

Airbus subsequently examined the flight-data recorder information and classified the event as a severe hard landing, adding that preliminary assessment showed "exceedance" of loads on the fuselage, wings and main landing-gear.
The aircraft, a 2009 airframe, was eventually grounded in Bangalore on 4 October, five days after the incident.
08/10/19 David Kaminski-Morrow/Flight Global